Ichiro helps Japan repeat

Extra-inning win gives team its second WBC championship

LOS ANGELES – Say this for the World Baseball Classic, if a bit snidely. Organizers have had no trouble finding neutral sites for the WBC championship game.

Three years after a sellout crowd at Petco Park watched Japan thump Cuba for the inaugural WBC title, Dodger Stadium was nearly filled last night with a tournament-record 54,846 people, cacophonic response to every swing of the bat and some seriously scintillating baseball between heated rivals.

Not since Kirk Gibson has a batter unleashed the kind of pandemonium here as South Korea's Bum Ho Lee did with his game-tying single off Japan star pitcher Yu Darvish with two out in the bottom of the ninth.

But then Seattle Mariners superstar Ichiro Suzuki delivered a 5-3 victory and a repeat championship for Japan. On the eighth pitch of his at-bat against Korean reliever Chang Yong Lim, Suzuki stroked a two-out, two-run single in the 10th.

Obviously, you don't need Team USA in the title game to make a tourney a rousing success, much as it might help Major League Baseball get the host country to pay more attention to its brainchild. Once the Americans were eliminated with relative ease by Team Japan in the Sunday semifinal, the next-best thing had to be another matchup between the Japanese and Koreans in a metropolis with huge Asian-American populations, and nobody in Chavez Ravine seemed to mind that the two teams were playing for the fifth time since March 5.

Beaten twice by starter Jungkeun Bong in earlier rounds, most recently last week in San Diego, Japan took a 1-0 lead on him last night with three singles and a Korean error in the fourth. Japanese starter Hisashi Iwakuna had given up just one hit when Cleveland Indians outfielder Shin-Soo Choo opened the fifth with a solo blast over the center field wall.

Japan went back ahead in the seventh, however, with three consecutive singles, and Akinori Iwamura's sacrifice fly in the eighth made it 3-1. Dae Ho Lee's sacrifice fly in the bottom of the eighth cut Korea's deficit in half, and Darvish was unable to hold the one-run lead when he entered in the ninth.

While the '09 WBC did seem to lack the U.S. buzz that came with the novelty in '06, the event has been a TV ratings smash in Asia and actually drew higher overall attendance to its 39 games. Last night's count pushed the '09 total to 801,408, far exceeding the '06 total of 737,112. Aside from the 42,314 that witnessed the U.S.-Canada game in Toronto, the largest crowds before L.A. were in Tokyo for Team Japan's games in Pool A.

“It's not necessarily about here all the time,” said Paul Archey, an MLB executive vice president and point man on the WBC. “There's a broader view of this thing.”

It looks, too, like the WBC is here (and there) to stay. If anything's been proven over the first two tourneys – aside from the fact that Asians are crazy about baseball and play it extremely well – it's that the WBC isn't a simple case of the U.S. and Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico flexing its muscle. To the contrary.